How to Lose your Faith

 

Did you ever notice that you have been made human?

Well, of course you have. But it's a problem, isn't it? I mean, you were made human, but it seems like every time we turn around, we're being told to be something else. More spiritual, more perfect, more like Jesus. And none of these things seem to fit in to the reality of humanity. Humanity is random, very flesh and blood, and full of error. It's a thing, for sure. What exactly, then, are we to do with these two things that seem so far apart, spirit and humanity?

Well, Simone Weil had something so say about that. 

"Whoever puts his life in his faith in God can lose his faith but he who puts his life in God Himself will never lose it."

We are often told that the bridge between the perfection of the spirit and the imperfection of humanity is faith, but Simone doesn't think that works. The problem is that faith only stops with the act of believing and doesn't go far enough. Believing isn't going to do it because it centers on us, not on God. Believing is what we do, not who we are supposed to be believing in . Believing is a created thing. We create it with our mind and intellect. And as such, it is as misguided a goal as wealth or fame. Faith is just a thing. It's God we really want, isn't it? And God isn't reached by faith or any kind of constructed belief or practice. God is reached by encounter and fellowship directly with Him. 

It's kind of like believing the Bible. If belief in and following the Bible is our goal, that's one thing. But it can end up kind of like worshiping a book. A good book for sure, but it is still a book. The Bible is not God. It may be from God or about God, but it is not God. Neither is faith. The Bible and faith are both tools, means to an end, but not good final goals. There's more. With God, there's always more.

The temptation is to go to church, read your Bible, learn prayers and verses, then kind of dust off your hands from all the effort (and it is an effort) and think you're done. 

But that's just the beginning. It's like putting a carcass on the table without meat. There's a framework to build on, but nothing of real substance to nourish.

God gave us the Bible to lead us to Him. That's it. Nothing more. 

He gave us faith, and prayer, and church families for that, too. Nothing more. It's Him. It was always Him. 

Faith and doctrinal frameworks provide support on which those things might grow, but there's little point in growing a tomato plant if you never pick the tomatoes. 

Faith is not the fruit of a well-lived life. Life in God is. Faith is temporary. You will not need it in heaven. 

Knowing your Bible is not the fruit of a well-lived life. God is. You will not need someone else's idea of what God is saying in heaven.

Building a strong church is not the fruit of a well-lived life. God is. You will be part of a church with no walls, no hymns, no bake sales in heaven. 

When God tells us to focus on the eternal, He means Himself. 

So lose your faith, and focus on Him, where faith becomes irrelevant because He is so real.

image: beliefnet

I Need a Hero

 

I went to see Chris Nolan's Odyssey yesterday.

I couldn't resist, having a sincere weakness for Homer and his epic poems - that Nolan should attempt this fabulous tale, one that has never lost its fascination, was worth the ticket alone. But it didn't work for me.

We left half way through, unsatisfied, and not knowing at first exactly why. I was just disappointed, deflated, knowing that something crucial was missing. And then my companion shook his head. I didn't see Odysseus, he said. All I saw was Matt Damon. That was it. It was impossible, incredible, but Nolan had made the Odyssey without a real hero. Matt either didn't have it in him or couldn't find it or was directed badly. Never mind that Telemachus was almost Woke or that the CG was better than some of the acting. The movie tried really hard, but in the end, at least for me, it fell flat. 

Then I started to think. Why is Homer so important, so lasting? I think it's that we love heroes.

Oh sure, there's a lot of talk about sports heroes and that kind of thing, but a real hero? They are a bit harder to come by. And what defines them? Bonnie Tyler, in 1984, thought she knew:

Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods?

Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn, and I dream of what I need

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong, and he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure, and it's gotta be soon

And he's gotta be larger than life, larger than life  

And maybe she wasn't too far from right on. Okay, the white knight business is a bit much, but some of rest sounds pretty right. Strong and fast, sure and right on time. That makes a lot of sense. Someone who brings just what we need when we can't and it seems like we need it so much. It's not always someone like Hercules or Odysseus or Achilles. It's not always even a man. Sometimes it's the person who is standing right next to you, the one who reaches into your chaos without fear and says "lean on me". And then does it. Every time. 

As far as films go, Uberto Pasolini and Ralph Fiennes did much better by Odysseus in his The Return. Here was an Odysseus I could understand. 

Worn from 20 years of war and struggle, he was visibly shredded, but found something in him that was larger than life and became the hero, not because he killed all the bad guys and came home to the girl, but because battled his own demons and won right before our eyes. Better than that, in the process he gathered in the people around him and proved true. 

There aren't many people like this in our world. There's a lot of flash and a lot of emotion, but real heroes? Not so much. They might be there, but they're hiding in plain sight most of the time.

You know, most of us can handle our day-to-day crises, even the larger ones that rear their nasty heads. But there are those days when our resources are at an end, when our doubts and fears get the best of us, and it's on those days we long for a hero who will stand in the gap of our weaknesses. 

I have two of them. There is God of course, who never fails and when my faith is strong enough to hold on to Him who has no flesh and blood, I gather all the strength I need from Him. But there are still those days when I shrink and fade in the face of the world's roller coaster. That's when my life's companion steps in. His hands, very much flesh and blood, reach out and catch me with confidence, strong and always right on time, and then hold on tight until I stop shaking.

May we all need to be someone's hero. It's in there. We just need to find it.

Sullying the Image

 

Mediocrity.

Good, comfortable, mediocrity.

No one rises above anyone else. No one keeps score in case someone might show themselves more able, more bold, than someone else. We are not only all equal in our dignity and humanity but we are all the same in our abilities and our courage. There are no heroes. There are no innate leaders. We are not challenged. We are satisfied.

Bah. 

Even Jesus knew that a society founded on mediocrity doesn't work. 

"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." -Rev 3: 15-16

I am often mocked for finding truth in philosopher (and fierce capitalist) Ayn Rand, but sometimes, I just can't help it. Some of what she has to say rings true.

We don't want any great men. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept, and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop incentive to improvement, to perfection. 

This is why Jesus spits the mediocre out of His mouth. He wants excellence. He made us for perfection.

"Be ye perfect, like my heavenly Father is perfect." - Matthew 5:48

Perfect. And He's not kidding.

We may forget that we were made in God's image, but He hasn't. He did it and we are expected to live up to it. That means to be the best we can be, the most Christ-like, the most holy. We are to strive, not slump into perpetual, amused relaxation. 

There's a reaon for this.

There will always be venal men or women who will exploit our ennui. They will take advantage of our contentedness with the average and rise above, not with ability or nobility but with shrewdness, greed, and calculated corruption. Look around. We already live, at least partially, in this world. Do you wonder why?  Look in the mirror.

To what extent have you been given a vision of a life, a community, that offered something more than vanilla and done little to work toward it?

When have you been satisfied not with your best, but with just good enough?

To what extent have you traded the hours of your life to being amused?

Even the church can forget that, although we are taught to be the servant of one another, that assumes that everyone involved understands the principle of godly service. When some don't, we don't have a community of mutual service, but of servants and masters. Instead of all of us serving God, we end up serving someone who has no God. We are not to yield our godly image to them. We are not to forsake our holiness or our excellence to the service of those who dominate and destroy. 

We are responsible for preserving what we've been given and this is done one soul at a time. It is done starting with you.

image: istock

Who's Dying When We Kill Time?

 

"One cannot kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This is where I get to air a pet peeve.

I get really edgy when someone tells me they are doing something because it "takes up the time" or because it "makes the time pass".

  Are you kidding me?

I am 74 years old and the one single resource I have in shortest supply is time. I weigh almost everything I do in terms of whether it is worth the time I'm allowing it. Should I read this book? Not if it doesn't do enough for me to be worth the slice of my dwindling life I have to allot it. Should I take this trip? Not if all it does is relieve a state of boredom that I shouldn't be subject to anyway. If I'm bored, it isn't because I'm not enough amused. It's because I'm not enough interested or curious.

Henry David was right. 

Life is the supreme gift. Just the privilege of being alive. Acknowledging this gift means that every moment must be lived, really felt and experienced and noted as it passes. Just being aware of our surroundings, as he was, is enough to fill us with wonder. The change of seasons. The chance to laugh with someone. To watch something grow. To smell fresh ground spices or fresh peaches hot coffee or wet paint. To feel our muscles move when we dig a hole or dance or embrace someone we love.  

Once, when I was talking to my daughter-in-law, Gina, trying to understand why she kept such a seemingly frantic schedule for herself and her family, she just shrugged and told me, "These days won't last forever and I don't want to miss a thing." In essence, she was telling me that she doesn't want just to witness her life pass. She wants to live it.

The specific intention to live makes amusement a thief.

Eternity is the tree of life that grows from the seed of a moment. Moments do not exist as separate entities but as contracted wholes, not strung one to another but discrete entireties. If we don't look out, we will run out of the time we're trying so hard to make pass. And then, it is not only time we run out of, but all of life and we will be left wondering where it's gone.

image: Illimilab

Marketing God: What Separation Wrought in the Church

 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

 The first part of the first amendment of the Constitution, written at a time when a state-proclaimed and -authorized religion was the order of the day and citizens could be prosecuted for practicing any other. Look carefully. It was not designed to protect the state from religion, but religion from the state.

And when the First Amendment put up the wall between church and state, something else happened. Religion became a new marketplace. New faith systems, and splinters from those faith systems, sprung up from disgruntled and fractionalized believers, creating a landscape of hundreds - literally hundreds - of different denominations. In the process, they made themselves compete for believers in a way not much different from the way competing advertisements praise their laundry soaps or SUVs. 

A cynic might shake their head and muse that, of course their mandate is to preach the gospel to all the world - they need to fill their pews and increase the target pool, though that is not likely to be their main motive. After all, the command to preach is part of the gospel and assuming it wasn't one of those add-ons that are uprooted from time to time, needs to be taken seriously from a viewpoint beyond marketing. However...however....

The result of abolishment of a national religion cannot be denied. We have churches that unabashedly appeal to those who demand entertainment and an uplifting, but often shallow, Sunday morning experience. We have religions based on doctrine or atmosphere rather than an experience of God. We have parishioners who stay in a church only so long as they are not challenged or offended, then readily migrate to the next one. We have every kind of worship practice from rock bands and strobe lights to snake charmers and Bible thumpers. 

It's hard to look at the total landscape of divisive faith flavors and not wonder what in the world this has to do with the Jesus they (or at least some of them) claim to follow, the Jesus of the sermon on the mount, the Jesus who had no church building, or anywhere to lay His head, and apparently needed none to effectively follow His Father. 

image: religious freedom/Old Life

The Sun is Always Rising

 

I took this photo from the middle aisle of a 787 on the way to Rome. I'd been tracking our progress: Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and then this. A brilliant full moon over what I knew was nothing but miles of ocean. A full moon that dazzled the eye of the plane window. A moon and nothing else but black sea below. 

But I knew the direction we were heading - the plane was flying to Rome - East, directly toward the rising sun. The moon wouldn't last long. We were leaving it behind.

It's always that way. The sun is always rising somewhere even when all looks black where I happen to be. Today, I get to catch up to it and hold it almost in my hands, possessing its power to turn the world bright and hot again. 

The way home, which I took in a little over three weeks, holds the same sun in stasis for hours, like it did for Joshua at Gibeon, daylight getting neither shorter or longer, until we land back in Chicago after ten hours in the air, but at almost the same time of day. 

The world is big and round and we could, if we wanted to stay in motion, experience a constant rising sun, a world of unextinguishable hope and possiblity. All we have to do is stay above the surface, gliding along it at the same pace as the globe is turning, and we never have to leave the brimming daylight behind. 

This is not a practical possibility, of course. We have to live a life somewhere in the process, but it can be a sustainable state of mind. We can, if we want, remember on our darkest days that the sun is still rising somewhere.

Defining Beauty

 I'm back in Florence.

This time, I took the whole family. There are nine of us - children,  one of the spouses, and all five granddaughters. And me. And this time, they made the itinerary. I told them to choose whatever fascinated them the most, hoping of course, they would see in it what I did: the grandeur of the Renaissance, the beauty of the art, and the history of politics, and the glory of God. And, of course, they did not. They chose very differently. A favorite winery, an interactive museum, a fortress town from a video game. Except  to see the David, no one wanted to go near an art gallery. Except for the Vatican and the  Pantheon, no one was interested in a church. 

It's not generational. It's more temperament, I think. Anyway, whatever it is, what brought me to Florence, and what keeps me going back, is the beauty. In art, in architecture, in science, in literature, in music, in the easy statliness of the ringing bells and the delightful lilt of Italian voices. It is all beautiful, and weaves an intoxicating web that catches me every time. I don't care much about the shopping or the gelato. I do care about the chanted rhytum of the nunc dimitis and the graceful swing of the bells in the campanile. I care about the marbeled eyes of a hero that seem to really see.

 I care about the medallion in the Piazza de la Signoria commemorating the hanging and burning of my favorite renegade monk, Girolamo Savanarola, 

I care about the  second floor garden that confined the imprisoned Galileo. I care about trying to figure out whether the Medicis, who largely financed Renaissance art, were benefactors or tyrants (they were probably both).

Lorenzo the Magnificent

For a long time, I couldn't figure out why I cared about any of this, then Simone Weil told me:

"Beauty is the incarnation of God in the world so all first rate art is inherently religious. Beauty is the real presence of God in matter."

That's exactly it. Beauty is how God shows Himself in the world. That's why we all recognize it in some form. God is in all of us, but the extent to which we seek out God determines the extent to which we are able to appreciate beauty. Beauty is part of our blood and bone in the same way as is oxygen or iron. There's a disease in Florence called Stendahl Syndrome - literally a malady characterised by dizziness or fevers- that is the result of too much beauty too fast. 

Beauty is the way we bridge the gap between God and man. Another piece of Weil wisdom: 

"Workers need poetry more than bread. Only religion - God - can be the source of this poetry. Its deprivation explains all forms of demoralization. Slavery is work without the light of eternity." 

And we are meant to bridge that gap. That, I think, is our main job as humans. That's the reason for the Eucharist - to apply the glory of God to material cells. 

"Manual work is time entering the body. Through work, man becomes matter like Christ in the Eucharist. "

Exactly. God gives us Himself. In bread. In art. In work. In beauty. 

Florence image: History Extra

David image: Fine Art America

Savanarola image: Alamy

Lorenzo image: Wikipedia